Northeastern University executed one of the most dramatic turnarounds in higher education. Its recipe for success? A single-minded focus on just one list.

In 1996, Richard Freeland looked across the sea of crumbling parking lots that was Northeastern University —the university had been a victim of notably federal cutbacks— and saw an opportunity few others could.

Freeland believed that if Northeastern could justify its increased costs to students and parents, it could be saved. And one gauge consistently determined a college’s value: its position on the U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” rankings. Freeland observed how schools ranked highly received increased visibility and prestige, stronger applicants, more alumni giving, and, most important, greater revenue potential.

Schools have argued that the rankings are subjective. Defenders of the rankings maintain that the system exposes students to more schools and helps the consumer compare products. Regardless, students, graduate schools, and employers have embraced the list, giving it unprecedented power.

Now that MOOCs appear to have reached the downward slope of the ever-shifting global higher education reform “hype cycle”, other models have emerged on the fringes of tertiary education that promise even more “disruptive innovation” in years to come.

These models may fundamentally change the professoriate and the university as they have come to be known over the past almost 1,000 years. A future that envisions a (more or less) professor-less future for higher education.

Two radically contrasting emerging models of higher education in the US offer academics a very different deal: higher education with no professors, only competencies; and higher education with no universities, only professors.

What Can Higher Education Learn from Amazon’s Destruction of Big-Box Bookstores? The EvoLLLution

Twenty years ago, there were more than 4,000 bookstore locations in the United States. Today, almost all of the independent and small chain bookstores are gone. What happened, and why so quickly?

The big-box booksellers eliminated independent booksellers. But as the big-box stores were finishing off the indies, Amazon started the process of finishing off the big-box resellers — ironically, when they seemed invulnerable.

What Higher Ed Can Learn? Digitization has taken a foothold in higher ed. In the form of online courses and degrees it provides students with many benefits, the principal one being convenience.That convenience can be a game changer for students enrolled in higher ed who are older than the traditional student age of 18 to 25. The opportunity to be in the “classroom” when you can is a powerful alternative to brick-and-mortar attendance.

But it won’t stop there. Here are some of the (many) other digital developments playing out before our eyes: MOOCs; full curriculum online degrees; competency-based, inexpensive online degrees.

Five Top Tips for New Department Heads – and They’re Not What You ExpectThe Guardian

If you think you know what being a head of department entails, think again. These days, it’s about making connections and being an ambassador.

Academics are a difficult tribe to rule. Thus, managing an academic department is widely regarded as a contradiction in terms: “management” is what vice-chancellors do, while academics try to avoid being managed.

Here are a few tips for potential heads of department that give a flavour of what it’s really like.

On vacations, employees at Daimler, the German automaker, can set their corporate email to “holiday mode.” Anyone who emails them gets an auto-reply saying the employee isn’t in, and offering contact details for an alternate, on-call staff person. Then poof, the incoming email is deleted.

Limiting workplace email seems radical, but it’s a trend in Germany, where Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom have adopted policies that limit work-related email to some employees on evenings and weekends.

This trend is not exclusive to Germany. At the Toronto office of Edelman, the global public relations firm, managers created the “7-to-7” rule. Employees are strongly discouraged from emailing one another before 7 a.m. and after 7 p.m.

When email is seen as an infinite resource, people abuse it. It’s an acknowledgment that the only way to really reduce email is to persuade colleagues not to reflexively write every time they have the tiniest question. If a corporation constrains its use, each message becomes more valuable — and employees become more mindful of how and when they write.

More and more companies are acknowledging the importance of work-life balance, at least as far as official policy goes. Unfortunately, policies aren’t worth much in the absence of supporting culture. Research shows that an organization’s work-life culture has enormous power over behavior.

Culture is what really defines how much latitude people have in terms of managing their work and non-work demands, whether or not there’s a flextime policy on the books. How, then, can business leaders start cultivating a healthier work-life culture?

The levers at hand are communications and, more important, personal modeling – both by executives at the top and in the management ranks.But it’s surprisingly hard to shift the culture of an existing organization. It takes a high level of consistency in communications, rewards, and executive behaviors over time. To drive all of these in the same, positive direction, you need a work-life vision.

Having a work-life vision means being able to offer an overarching point of view that is compelling to people and provides guidance to their daily behaviors, decisions, and practices. Here’s a work-life vision that might serve you well: The best managers in our organization are the ones who best manage the energy of their teams.

Things that you can now rent instead of buying: a power drill, a song, a tent, an office for an hour, a Prada handbag, a wedding dress, a painting, a dog, your neighbor’s car, a drone.

This new way of consuming — call it the Netflix economy — is being built by web start-ups that either rent items themselves or serve as middlemen, connecting people who want something with people who own it.

Technology has made borrowing possible at a broader scale, and between strangers. Social networking profiles and rating systems offer a level of trust and verification, and mobile phones equipped with GPS take much of the work out of pairing people.

Soon, tech entrepreneurs and investors say, we’ll be able to rent much of what we always thought we must own. As for how much this trend will change consumer culture, consider this: People who rent items often end up buying them.

The scientific A-Team saving the world from killer viruses, rogue AI and the paperclip apocalypseThe Guardian

Of the 90 Nobel prizes won by members of Cambridge University in the 20th century, 32 were won by members of Trinity. Its alumni include Isaac Newton, Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and six prime ministers.﻿

Inside the college, pacing the flagstones of what is called Great Court, are four men, the founders of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), and they are in the business of "horizon scanning". Together, they are on alert for what they sometimes call "low-probability-but-high-consequence events", and sometimes – when they forget to be reassuring – "catastrophe".

At their head is a 72-year-old cosmologist, Martin Rees following by Jaan Tallinn, a meditative Estonian computer programmer and one of five co-founders of Skype. There is a courtly Indian economic theorist, Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta. And there is Huw Price, a laid-back philosophy don – specifically, the Bertrand Russell professor of philosophy at Cambridge.

These four men are less concerned with acts of God than those we have created ourselves: the consequences of being too clever for our own good.